'Conservation is now a Dead Word': Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the Transformation of American Environmentalism

Jack E. Davis

THE MOOD of the assembly was as hostile as the evening was hot. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the last speaker of the night, was accustomed to both. Crowded in the high school auditorium were several hundred landowners from an east Everglades community that owed its existence to levees and drainage canals. To those in attendance, Douglas was "the anti-Christ," a sentimental environmentalist who was willing to trade their livelihoods and their homes to save birds and alligators and snakes. "Go back to Russia, granny," someone shouted when her time came to speak. Against an eruption of boos and jeers, the ninety-one-year-old Douglas moved confidently down the center aisle to have her say before the county commissioners. Her task that night was to persuade the commission to limit construction on 155,000 acres of privately held land "of critical environmental concern." Some people in the audience were appropriately defensive, for Douglas, the sanctified "Grandmother of the Everglades," was known for capturing the ear of policymakers and, indeed, the hearts of the American people. After pulling the microphone down to her five-foot frame, she waited for a break in the escalating noise. "You damn butterfly chaser," came a voice from above the din. Finally, she said, "Look. I'm an old lady. I've been here since eight o'clock. It's now eleven. I've got all night, and I'm used to the heat." In the end, the commissioners voted the way of the environmentalists.1	1
The elderly woman who made it her civic duty to save the Everglades from drainage, development, and bureaucratic control was no simple butterfly chaser. Former Assistant Secretary of the Interior Nathaniel Reed described Douglas as "that tiny, slim, perfectly dressed, [but] utterly ferocious grande dame who can make a redneck shake in his boots." Douglas had established herself as an expert on Florida history and the environment in 1947 when she published The Everglades: River of Grass, a path-breaking book that later became the green bible of Florida environmentalists. Even Douglas's antagonists respected her knowledge and foresight. Through many years of lobbying, writing, educating, and cajoling, she helped raise the plight of the Everglades to the top of the national agenda, resulting in important state and federal legislation that signified changing environmental policy. Countless honors and awards acknowledged her work as a writer and environmentalist. The one that capped her public career was the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the government's highest civilian honor, which she received at age 103. When she died in 1998, at 108, she had been one of the most celebrated environmental leaders in the last decades of the twentieth century. President Clinton, who once described Douglas as Mother Nature herself, said she had been "both an inspiration and mentor for a generation."2	2
Spanning much of the twentieth century, the long sweep of Douglas's public life provides an ideal case study for American environmentalism and its rise as a movement out of the traditions of progressive conservation. By studying Douglas, one encounters the linkages between the modern environmental movement and early conservation impulses.3 Her life in a burgeoning Miami at the beginning of the twentieth century reveals the diverse nature of early conservation, including the influence of organized women and their myriad progressive reforms. Miami's proximity to the Everglades, still an uncharted wilderness but one that was believed to offer great economic potential, forced civic-minded women to take stock of both urban and extra-urban environments. Interested in the city and the countryside, Douglas reconciled a utilitarian outlook with wilderness preservation. Her eventual shift away from a progressive-conservation understanding of the human relationship with the non-human world illustrates the role that ecology played in shaping modern environmental sensibilities. Her extraordinary resurrection in the last decades of her life as a public activist—and one more assertive than before—dramatizes the larger transformation in American environmentalism. One can find many of the characteristics that scholars identify with the contemporary movement in Douglas's later life: the deployment of grass-roots activism, the lessons of ecological science, the rise of environmental justice, the admixture of anthropocentrism and biophilia, and the socialized sensibilities of womanhood.	. . .